The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

by Rick Perlstein

  The bizarre meeting of April 15: “The President recalled the fact that at one point we had discussed the difficulty in raising money and that he had said that $1 million was nothing to raise to pay to maintain the silence of the defendants. He said that he had, of course, only been joking when he made that comment.” Dean then described the curious moment when the president got out of his chair, went to a corner of his office, “and in a nearly inaudible tone said to me he was probably foolish to have discussed Hunt’s clemency with Colson.” As they took their leave, Dean said he “told the President that I hoped that my going to the prosecutors and telling the truth would not result in the impeachment of the president. He jokingly said, ‘I certainly hope so also,’ and he said it would be handled properly.”

  At that, anchorman Reynolds looked like a balloon relieved of its air. “Well. Lotsa laughs,” he said. “Huh,” he added, practically under his breath.

  DEAN’S WEEK AT THE GREEN table stopped business in the offices of high White House officials. House Republicans skipped debates on the floor, glued to a TV set installed in their cloakroom. Evans and Novak reported that most “reluctantly gave Dean high marks as a witness,” and that his testimony “may have finally broken the self-confidence of the Nixon administration. If that has happened, the President’s painful choice lies between resignation or a presidency crippled far into the future.”

  The second day commenced with his grilling by the panel. The committee’s brilliant majority counsel, Sam Dash, author of the standard legal study on the subject of wiretapping, asked if the president had known of the illegality of the cover-up. Dean, heart-stoppingly, said that was obviously the case. The minority counsel, Fred Thompson, a young sideburned and dandyish former assistant U.S. attorney only recently responsible for putting away bank robbers and moonshiners back in Tennessee, tried with considerably less sharpness to impeach Dean’s motives. And when Senator Eugene Talmadge, Democrat of Georgia, took his turn, he displayed a list Dean had submitted of all the people in the White House and on the reelection committee who Dean believed had violated laws. He asked Dean the significance of the asterisks beside most of names. They all were lawyers, Dean explained.

  Laughter.

  Lunch break.

  Frank Reynolds summarized the day so far: “He seemed to retain his composure and so far as we can tell right now was not caught in any contradictions.”

  Donaldson described the passing scene: senators and journalists milling about, spectators buzzing excitedly, Dean pulling himself into a tight circle with “with some lawyers,” “some aides,” and “some bodyguards.”

  Reynolds, with a start: “He has bodyguards?”

  He did. Woodward and Bernstein had picked up what they thought were credible rumors that there might be attempts to assassinate him. Innocence was melting all over.

  Commercials for Clairol Naturally Blond Colors (“I’m mist . . . I’m fawn . . . I’m surf . . . I’m buttercup!”) and Final Net (“So you finally got little Janie married!’). Senator Lowell Weicker, Republican of Connecticut, took over. He cut an imposing enough figure: six foot six, 250 pounds, gruff-voiced, born in Paris, Yale ’53, heir to an industrial fortune—an East Coast aristocrat with the confidence proper to the class. When he had been named to the Ervin Committee, he hired his own private investigative staff. In his May 17 opening statement he called Watergate “the acts of men who almost stole America.” Now he developed a line of questioning running through a mind-numbingly diverse array of other Nixon-related thefts of America: another blizzard of names, dates, organizations, activities for those who couldn’t keep track of it all already.

  It was when Weicker began inquiring into the details of Dean’s filing system that people abruptly woke up.

  “Just briefly—and this will end my questioning, and I apologize to the committee for taking so much time, but it is a subject that I confess I don’t have every last bit of information on. It is a difficult thing to piece together, but I think it is a very important part of the story—”

  Most people had long ago lost the thread of what precisely the story at that point was supposed to be about. It involved something called the “Intelligence Evaluation Committee,” which turned out not to have been involved in anything improper: “As I say,” Dean said wearily, “I don’t know of the IEC itself preparing political material.” He appeared to be taking pity on his overeager interrogator, determined to lead him toward a more promising scent.

  “Of course,” he then said, “as I have submitted in documents, other agencies were involved in seeking politically embarrassing information on individuals who were thought to be enemies of the White House. I might also add that in my possession is a rather, very much down the line to what you are talking about, is a memorandum that was requested by me to prepare a means to attack the enemies of the White House. There was also maintained what was called an ‘enemies list,’ which was rather extensive and continually being updated.”

  Now the murmuring lasted a full five seconds. Maureen “Mo” Dean broke into a smile. Some reporters broke out in giggles. A boring afternoon had been electrified. And Richard Nixon’s “enemies list” became the new national obsession.

  Carol Channing, it appeared from the documents soon entered into committee records, was on the Enemies List. So were Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. And Barbra Streisand, and composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein. And the general secretary of the World Council of Churches. Ten Democratic senators and the twelve black members of the House. Newspapers like the New York Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and, of course, the Washington Post. Andy Warhol made the cut (the result of an accounting fluke: he donated 350 posters of Richard Nixon reading “Vote McGovern” to the Democrat’s presidential campaign, and they were reported as being worth $350,000, making him one of McGovern’s biggest donors). The head of United Artists, the film studio. (“Success here could be both debilitating and very embarrassing to the Muskie Machine.”) A principal in “[t]he top Democratic advertising firm—they destroyed Goldwater in ’64. They should be hit hard.” Morton Halperin, a former Kissinger staffer, now an executive in the open-government group Common Cause. (“A Scandal would be most helpful here.”) Mary McGrory of the Post. New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath, whose inclusion was exceedingly curious: the long-haired, mustache-and-fur-coat-wearing Casanova avoided politics except for his ostentatious patriotism. (A proposal was offered after the 1972 Olympics to revivify their cosmopolitan spirit by removing national anthems from medal ceremonies; Namath vociferously complained.) At least one “enemy,” an aide to the hawkish Democratic senator Scoop Jackson, was a fervent Nixon supporter. “Heaven help us,” he reacted, “if this is the slipshod way they do their intelligence work.” Another, a Baltimore Sun reporter, had been dead for three months when his name was added.

  Many considered inclusion an honor; Daniel Schorr said he prized it “more highly than my Emmy award.” A Wall Street Journal reporter wrote of his suspicion about what acts might have got him listed: maybe the time he wrote of “the Madison Avenue fuzziness Mr. Ziegler brings to the English language,” or when his wife announced at a party thrown by a White House speechwriter that they used an ashtray embossed with the presidential seal as a dog dish. Administration critics who were left off complained of the oversight. A fashionable bar in Manhattan held a party with the Enemies List as guest list. A gag book, White House Enemies; Or, How We Made the Dean’s List, printed the names (more than two hundred, all told), the relevant memos, wacky political cartoons, a word search, and an Art Buchwald column, all wrapped in a cover depicting Nixon as a Nazi matron guarding twenty “enemies” in striped prison suits behind barbed wire. Others did not find it funny. William F. Buckley Jr. said the Enemies List was “fascist in its reliance on the state as the instrument of harassment.”

  So what did the “enemies list” really signify? Charles Colson, its primary author, claimed a benign purpose: to “keep the social office, the personnel office, the
press office, the counsel’s office, and other offices in the White House advised of persons who had been particularly supportive of the President or persons who had been particularly critical of the President.” A document introduced into the record written by Dean and dated August 16, 1971, suggested differently. It asked: “How can we use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies?”

  It wouldn’t be easy, the memo allowed; the Internal Revenue Service was “dominated and controlled by Democrats.” Where there had been a will, however, there had been a way: presently, “enemies” from Andy Warhol to Walter Mondale to the author of an investigative series in Newsday on Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo stepped forward to report that they had seen their tax returns aggressively audited during precisely the period in question.

  SENATOR DANIEL INOUYE, THE JAPANESE-AMERICAN Medal of Honor winner whose right arm had been amputated during World War II, took his turn questioning Dean. At a February meeting in California in which the Watergate principals strategized about the just-announced members of the Ervin Committee, Ehrlichman punned on his name as “Ain’t-no-way,” as in “ain’t no way he’s going to give us anything but problems.” But there is an old joke that defines a liberal as someone who can’t even take his own side in an argument. Perhaps that was why this liberal used his time on Dean’s third day by reading thirty-nine questions White House counsel Fred Buzhardt had prepared with the help of a young White House aide named Diane Sawyer to challenge Dean’s testimony. This, since Nixon was refusing to testify, Inouye said in his aristocratic voice, would “give the President his day in court.”

  “There is no reason to doubt,” the document read, “that John Dean was the principal actor in the Watergate cover-up,” with “a great interest in covering up for himself.” It went on to portray Dean as the instigator, on behalf of his patron John Mitchell, of the Watergate burglary itself. For more than an hour and a half, Dean punched through the inquisition effortlessly. The next day the White House backtracked, sending out a deputy press secretary to claim the questions hadn’t come from the White House at all, but from Buzhardt acting in his capacity as an independent citizen. Reporters joked they had been rendered “inoperative.”

  The third day the Man Who Keeps Asking Why had his turn. “The net sum of your testimony is fairly mind-boggling,” Senator Baker began. He said he had no desire to impeach it. He was interested, however, in context. He stated the central question in a way that would be repeated again and again in the months to come. “What did the President know and when did he know it?” It reverberated. It named the stakes.

  At which, at Baker’s prompting, Dean went through his recollections once more—demonstrating that the president knew quite a lot, quite early in the game. At least if you trusted John Dean. That was the bottom line: it was his word against the president’s. “The record is essentially incomplete if we don’t have the testimony of all those present,” Baker pointed out at adjournment. “The man who can tell us what was in the President’s mind is the President.” He said he hoped his old friend might testify. A White House spokesman quickly announced that for Nixon to do so would do “irreparable damage” to the Constitution.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  * * *

  Nostalgia

  THE SUSPICIOUS CIRCLES FOUND THE president’s retreat behind the Constitution excruciating. The man he had made his attorney general, John Mitchell, after all, had arrogated for himself such extraordinary powers to surveil without a warrant that the Supreme Court had smacked him down unanimously. John Mitchell was the man who had allowed G. Gordon Liddy to drone on in the sacred citadel of justice about plans to kidnap, spy on, and entrap Democrats with prostitutes. Who was under indictment for arranging an illegal quid pro quo donation of $200,000 in cash passed over in a suitcase. And on July 10, this paragon of constitutionalism would have his day at the witness table to defend himself before the American people.

  The Ervin Committee had adjourned for a long Independence Day holiday. In the interim, American morality seemed all but to disintegrate. In Atlantic City, boxer Ernie Terrell lost to Chuck Wepner in a decision so fishy it touched off a near riot. Terrell, asked if he could believe what had just happened, said, “I didn’t believe Watergate could happen. I didn’t believe John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X could have been assassinated.” In Texas, an industrial poultry farm drowned forty-three thousand baby chicks, claiming it was cheaper than feeding them grain. In New Orleans an arsonist torched a gay bar, killing twenty-nine. In Illinois, a former governor, Otto Kerner Jr., faced a jail term. Democratic senator Jim Abourezk of South Dakota accused Big Oil of an “artificially contrived” shortage “to force the independent sector of the industry out of business and to get a price increase.”

  You could read several stories a day now about the new postdraft, post-Vietnam military careening between disciplinary breakdown and disciplinary overreach, a supposedly bedrock institution in utter identity confusion. The U.S. Air Force Academy tossed out two professors for criticizing the Pentagon—while simultaneously boasting of new, post-Vietnam “progressive” and “enlightened” disciplinary latitude, even while suffering a 40 percent attrition rate after three major cheating scandals in a row. Then came news that fifteen Air Force cadets had been hospitalized after “survival, evasion, resistance, and evasion” (SERE) training in an exercise simulating a mock POW camp, in which they were forced to squat on their haunches for hours at a time, were slapped and switched with tree branches, and were stuck all night in isolation boxes in which they could neither stand nor lie down.

  Pentagon studies disclosed nearly half of low-ranking Navy and Army personnel suffered an “exceptionally high rate of binge drinking, belligerence while drinking, and job, police, and financial problems relating to alcohol.” At West Point, nineteen cadets were under investigation for participating in a cheating ring, just as a cadet named James Pelosi was found guilty by his peers of an honor violation—not putting down his pencil the instant the order to cease work was given on an examination—and was exonerated on a technicality by a board of officers. His resentful classmates then submitted him to “silence,” a grotesque underground torment in which no cadet would make even eye contact with him until he resigned. He refused for more than a year and a half, losing twenty-six pounds from the stress. “The whole academy class should be tested psychologically to detect dormant sadism that might result in future Vietnams,” wrote a reader in Time.

  Admiral Stockdale filed treason charges against two more members of the POW Peace Committee. One of them committed suicide.

  This was the United States, the week of its 197th birthday. “The Roman Empire crumbled from within,” wrote a Chicagoan in the Tribune. “Isn’t that what is happening to us?”

  So when the sixty-seventh attorney general of the United States denied outright what six previous witnesses had attested to in sworn statements before Congress, it just seemed like the way of the world. Mitchell offered no quarter, either growling, glowering, or sitting in stony silence in the face of questions he did not prefer, cracking sadistic one-liners at the ones he deigned to answer. He knew nothing. The panel reacted with incredulity. He had frequently cruised along the Potomac with Nixon on the presidential yacht Sequoia, they pointed out, and yet the president had never bothered to ask him what he knew about Watergate? (No—and if he had, “I would have spelled it out chapter and verse.”) Why, they asked, hadn’t Mitchell told him the truth of his own accord? Because, he answered, then the president would “lower the boom,” turn Watergate into a huge national story, and threaten his own reelection.

  The brazenness of his answers astonished them. Why hadn’t he thrown Liddy out of his office, with all his talk of kidnapping and call girls? “I should have thrown him out the window.” Why hadn’t he done more to hasten justice for the burglars? He replied, “It would have been simpler to take them out on the White House lawn and shoot them all.” When they grilled him about why he continued to do nothing as the s
candal mounted, with breathtaking cynicism he replied that they had an election coming up, and coming clean would only lead investigators to even more offensive “White House horror stories”—horror stories he glibly acknowledged: the ITT scandal, the Diem cable forgery, other “alleged extracurricular activities in the bugging area,” the Brookings firebombing rumbling, “miscellaneous matters” concerning Senator Kennedy; “this, that, and the other thing.”

  Senator Talmadge pressed: “Am I to understand from your response that you place the expediency of the next election above your responsibilities as an intimate to advise the President of the peril that surrounded him? . . . Did you state that the expedience of the election was more important than that?”

  “Senator, I think you have put it exactly correct. In my mind, the re-election of Richard Nixon, compared to what was available on the other side, was so much more important that I put it in just that context.”

  Then why not, Senator Inouye asked later, lower the boom after Election Day? Because, Mitchell replied, that would be “a detriment” to a successful second term.

  He said he had never approved any bugging operations; Magruder’s claim that he had was a “palpable, damnable lie.” And since Mitchell wouldn’t acknowledge the truth of a single thing any other witness said—and the president could never be cross-examined—an awful, awesome dread settled upon anyone who wished this particular horror might somehow, someday, end: “Watergate” could only ever resolve to a bog of crosscutting claims. A waste of time. A civic catastrophe.

  Then Mitchell dropped his cool.

  If he had known about the burglary at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, Senator Weicker asked, why didn’t he honor his oath as attorney general and tell the Ellsberg trial judge about it?